Radio Amateur Ensemble explores Minneapolis’s ham radio enthusiast community, taking the sonic, social and technological aspects of ham radio communication as scores and notations for improvisation and the sharing of new sound compositions. It will take the form of collaborative events, radio interventions, sonic installations, set design, open studios, and musical performances. Considering listening as a generative act, Radio Amateur Ensemble transforms the Goethe Pop Up space in Minneapolis’s skyways into a walkable score and a sound system. The ensemble, developed in collaboration with local musicians, invites the wider audience to take part in the ongoing dialogue exploring radio as a tool manifesting new social constellations, networks and organisms.

Kats’s project is developed in respect to Bertolt Brecht’s critique of radio as an instrument that standardizes individuals into passive listeners. Translating research findings sonically and rhythmically during the duration of the project, the compositions developed by the Radio Amateur Ensemble are performed and recorded during several public events at the Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis and released on a limited edition 7-inch vinyl.

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Anton Kats

Anton Kats is an artist and musician born in Kherson, South-Ukraine into the family of a WWII wireless radio operators. Kats‘s practice derives from informal everyday relationships within the vibrant neighborhood of his hometown and is complemented through necessity and pragmatics of self-legalization in Europe via entering formal institutions of education. His work with sound and radio often unfolds in public space in form of collaborative interventions, sonic sculptures, musical compositions, and public programs. Kats explores radio as a question of agency and intentionality through the concepts of the radio narrowcast and concrete listening.

He has been awarded a practice-based doctorate degree from Goldsmiths University of London. His works have been exhibited and performed in venues including the Serpentine Galleries, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Showroom Gallery, and at the documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.

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